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Eye of the Beholder

Funny thing about Brian De Palma movies. Even the bad ones, and “Black Dahlia” definitely is bad, are packed with different pleasures for different people.

I could not agree less with my colleague Glenn Whipp about Fiona Shaw’s two scenes. I laughed at bit at her dinner table twitchathlon while thinking all the while that a little self-control would have made that performance much funnier. And her spasmodic final scene (that we don’t want to give too much away about) was, to my sensibilities, just awful. It turned an already unwieldy suite of over-explanation into a ludicrous freak show and made a terrible ending more insufferable.

But if Glenn and others liked her work, it’s perfectly fine with me. That’s just the way things go with De Palma movies.

I enjoyed about half a dozen of the director’s specialty set-pieces in the movie. The long track through the wartime zuit suit riots which the cops find so amusing. The brutal boxing match staged and cut in a subjective yet visceral way that we haven’t seen in hundreds of other fight sequences. How we’re perversely distracted from the discovery of the Dahlia’s body, which any other filmmaker would have made the biggest and most obvious sequence. The gorgeous manipulation of space, rhythm and atmosphere during a Hitchcockian multiple murder. K. d. lang singing through a big, bent Busby Berekelyesque production number at a lesbian nightclub . . .

And then there’s “Black Dahlia’s” one genuinely good performance, Mia Kirshner’s as Elizabeth Short, the dead woman herself, seen in a series of flashbacks trying to land a movie role. Ironically, she’s the only character in the film who truly comes alive. That’s probably because Kirshner’s scenes were original and improvised, and not burdened by novelist James Ellroy’s fun-to-read but essentially unpeakable prose. It may also have something to do with the fact that these bits are actually little movies-within-the-movie about the process of moviemaking, and De Palma directed them best because that’s his greatest passion.

None of which makes “Black Dahlia’s” other characters or its overall story convincing or engaging. But like many a De Palma film that was widely reviled upon its release – “Dressed to Kill,” “Scarface,” “Body Double,” “Femme Fatale” – “Dahlia” may just earn some redemption as the years go by. As can already be seen, what some see as major flaws others are finding enjoyable.

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